It's a new day with a new way in an old country. Teaching English in China is exciting. You never know what will happen next. They never know what I will do next.

23 February 2007

What would "distributed teaching" be like?

Perhaps you've heard of the idea of computing tasks being farmed out to many different computers? Science and business use distributed computing to solve complex problems when the power of one computer is not enough. SETI is a rather big and public example of this. It uses tens of thousands of computers around the world to help with computations related to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Already technology is playing a role in our teaching. Ten years ago Email was not widely used. Ten years ago the Internet as we know it was just a baby. Now we use these things quite extensively. Many of us are using them in our teaching as well. We have set up websites, we communicate with our students and other teachers through the Internet. Email and VOIP (Internet telephony) technology have eliminated the sense of distance between each other and makes almost everyone in the world feel close.

Each new technology opens a new door to opportunities we didn't think of before. So we have to be constantly reevaluating the possibilities because what we can do today is something we couldn't do yesterday.

What would "distributed teaching" be like? Seeing how distributed computing has impacted computing, how would distributed teaching impact teaching? What would distributed teaching be like?

Perhaps a network of teachers in different locations forming a team and each one applying his specialty to work together on each other's students?

These are some questions I've been asking myself lately and, frankly, I don't really know but think there might be some interesting possibilities there. What do you think?

1 comment:

This original idea is so great that if put into practice it would be a teaching revolution. I'm interested in the idea. If each teacher in the group can spare one hour to do some volunteer work, it can work.

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